Always Alright
by Lafayette1777
Summary: Sanity is a relative thing, and after months at the hand of ruthless captors Q is left questioning his even more than usual. And, of course, his relationship with James Bond is not a reliable indicator. Even if Bond is the only company he wants, in the long run. Sequel to The Best Laid Plans, but can be read separately.
1. Clarity, or Lack Thereof

**Author's Note: Hello everyone! So, to those who know me, this is the first chapter of the promised sequel to _The Best Laid Plans._ If you don't know me, then this is the first chapter of a multi-chapter fic that can be read separately of it's prequel, though I would encourage you to read my other story for purely selfish reasons. Anyways, I expect this fic to be rather different than _The Best Laid Plans_, because of a shift in point-of-view and shorter, less action filled plot. Regardless, I hope you all enjoy and please review!**

The sniper rifle allows such an intoxicating level of clarity to its user. Through the lens, the world becomes very uncomplicated. The rifle enables distance, which in turn enables simplicity, and with a finger on the trigger the universe becomes very black and white.

James Bond has always thought that if he lives to retirement age, sees the time when he no longer has the wherewithal to leap around with razors between his knuckles or a Walther under his arm, he'll become a sniper. Get the job done by raining cut-and-dry death from above. Protect Queen and Country until what's left of his soul finally fails him forever.

Two and a half hours ago he awoke in a hotel room with the distinct notion that today would be a day that could be neither stood nor understood—it would be either inexplicably unfair or ridiculously fortunate, and both would be, in their own way, unbearable. Half an hour after that he steps out of a scorching shower and catches his cell phone on the last ring, with Moneypenny on the other end telling them they've confirmed the target's position and are moving in to retrieve him imminently. It's only later, when Bond shows up at the scene along with the field agents and the double-O's being deployed, that he realizes she wasn't supposed to tell him this. His knowledge was planned to be latent, but Moneypenny has always been a little more virtuous than she lets on.

But it's too late, so they hand him a high powered rifle and tell him to go climb a windmill, which he wastes no time in doing. The turbines spin lazily behind him as he braces himself against the flat surface, watching the fenced compound while wrapped in camouflaging reflective foil. Through the lens he watches the black clad figures surround the target area in the concealing predawn light. He hears their short, clipped radio chatter in his ear and swallows the ache that comes whenever he thinks of the voice that used to drift smoothly through his earwig.

On the signal, three dozen MI6 operatives storm the fence, guns blazing. They leap through the barbed wire unflinchingly, roll gracefully into standing positions as they hit the icy ground. Ragtag guards stream from the compound's buildings, flailing Kalashnikovs and Ak-47s ineffectually. A fully trained strike force is almost unbeatable, and this mission has been so well planned it's a virtual guarantee that the agents will triumph, on the whole. It's a matter of speed, now—a question of who will get to the retrieval target first.

A commotion draws Bond's sights to the southwest corner of the area, where a door is slammed open and a familiar figure swaggers forward. Tove Baek is bundled against the Icelandic cold, her blonde hair stuffed under a fox fur hat, leather gloved hands clasping two nine millimeter pistols. Her husband, Dae-Jung Baek, wearing a tasteful maroon scarf (Bond can't help but admire it for a moment, because separation does strange things to strange minds), is clawing at her, trying to persuade her out of the agents' line of fire and away from certain death. She shoots off a few rounds into the crowd of invaders, then slips behind a low cement building and around to it's backdoor, Dae-Jung on her heels. Time passes, with every muscle in Bond's body tensed. Eons later they emerge again, dragging a shape that at first he mistakes for a dead animal, but unfolds into a full grown person. A person with olive toned skin, shaggy dark hair. A person with a thick beard below a broken and crookedly healed nose. A person with thin, bruised wrists and tattered, bloodstained clothes. Bond chokes. Dae-Jung holds the ragged creature and Tove raises one of her guns to it's unkempt curls.

"I have a shot," Bond rasps. The airwaves are silent in the response. He stabilizes his sights between Tove's eyes. Still, no sound from his comrades, and he allows one eye to slide to where the earwig has slipped from it's cradle in his ear canal and on to the windmill beside him. As far as he's concerned, this signifies that the universe has affirmed his actions.

Across the icy plains a single gunshot rings, and blood splatters across Dae-Jung Baek's acetate-rimmed glasses.

m m m

The moment his feet touch the earth, the rifle drops from James Bond's hands, and he breaks into a sprint that tweaks his strained thigh muscle from last week. Personnel are flooding into the compound, medics and clean-up crews, and Bond's long strides push through them to where gore and flesh stain the ice. Tove Baek's body is being zipped into black bag, leaving bits of her hair and skull where she fell. Dae-Jung has collapsed, eyes glassy, mouth half open in shock. He sees Bond and it seems to jar him to the reality of the situation, and he lets from his lips a strangled little _"no."_Agents pull Dae-Jung away before Bond does something inevitably rash.

The third person is being lifted onto a backboard, face pale and strained. His eyes are shut tight, as though fending off pain or exhaustion or fear. The medics secure him, and as one reaches out to take his pulse he seems to spring awake, hazel eyes fierce and lucid. His eyes meet Bond's, whose carefully composed gaze is struck down into it's primal elements of relief and horror and disbelief. Neither man says a word.

And then the impossible happens: Q's face twists into a smile, showing off a chipped front tooth, enunciating the jagged line of his nose and cracked, dried liquid on his skin. The expression should be grotesque, but it's too pure. Months have passed and agony has etched lines in both their faces but nothing can damage a full smile.

Then he's gone, whisked away to be healed as best they can.

Moneypenny has appeared at Bond's side, speaking efficiently into a mobile phone. "He's alive. We'll be in Reykjavik in an hour."

She hangs up, and turns to Bond. Her smile is not quite as pure, because she is fully in touch with actuality, or at least the MI6 verisimilitude of it. She knows the protocols that follow the rescue of high level employees from enemy captivity, and in some ways they are as formidable as the captivity itself. Debrief, quarantine, reevaluation, reintegration. Exponential time and stress.

She communicates as much as she can through silence, though on some level Bond already knows that this is not the end of their troubles. Rather, it is the beginning of something infinitely new.


	2. The Quick and the Dead

It's December, and when they arrive in Reykjavík at three in the afternoon the sun's already dipping behind the great wall of ice and rock that overshadows the harbor. A cutting breeze blows through his coat and scarf the moment he steps from the company car, but he hardly notices, a trance settling over his senses. It's most unnerving for a man of his profession, but he can't lift it away, and the world numbs into an inconceivable lull outside his head. On instinct, he reaches out to steady Moneypenny as she wobbles onto the curve, her habit of wearing impractical heels undeterred by her physical condition. The left side of her face briefly droops from fatigue, but she regains control of it again with a little concentration. Recovering, she shepherds his stiff limbs across the sidewalk, toward the airport terminal. His mind races as she checks them in, as she smiles at the airport staff like the universe is still as perfect and orderly as it was ten months ago.

It's only when she shoves him gently into a first class seat does his brain snap back to attention. He grabs her wrist. "Where is he?"

Her eyes only betray the slightest alarm at his sudden return to the living, and she replies coolly, "They've got him on a private jet back to Medical. Molony is standing by in London for him."

"He's okay."

"He's alive."

"I can't believe it."

She settles into her seat, and he hears the soft click of the seatbelt clasping together over her trim waist. "In all honesty, I can't either."

"You thought we lost him?" he doesn't bother to keep the offense out of his voice, irrational though it may be.

"Did you?"

Bond looks at her, azure eyes oddly blank. "I didn't think anything at all."

"For all those months?" she asks, a hint of a smile on the edge of her mouth.

When he doesn't reply, the smile drops.

m m m

Moneypenny sleeps through the flight, and as time passes the creases slowly melt off her face. This is her ritual, he supposes, after a mission: let slumber erase whatever demons get left behind.

And so he employs his traditional actions also—in his case, the only ritual is to get inebriated in as short a time as possible. He's built up a considerable tolerance, so it takes seven dirty martinis just to get him to feel any buzz at all. The flight attendants watch him carefully when he stands to use the loo, and their surprise is nearly palpable when they don't see him sway in the slightest.

On the ground in England he starts to regret the martinis. Not because the buzz isn't lightening his spirits but because he shouldn't _need_ his spirits lightened—this is a day that has occupied his thoughts as long as he allows his memory to go back. This is a day to remember. This day should make all those months irrelevant.

But he should've known the guilt would survive.

m m m

The moment their feet hit the floor of the MI6 lobby, Moneypenny's called into a meeting. It's undoubtedly something to do with the recovery of the Quartermaster, and before she's herded off she sends him a warning look and hisses, for what he presumes is appearances sake, "Remember protocol."

He waits exactly thirty-two seconds before ignoring this completely.

In the elevator, the floors lower and the bewildered looks increase. The higher the security clearance, it seems, the more amazed the employee is that not only does James Bond appear to be acting like a semi normal human being, but that the Quartermaster has been returned in what one can only be assumed is one piece.

By the time he's arrived in Medical, he's in no mood for questioning glances, and so choses a stride with such purpose that no one can muster the will to challenge him. His ears guide him to the voice, that familiar, evenly toned cadence that is currently engaged in explaining, in great detail, all his known injuries to a rapidly scribbling nurse.

Bond snaps open the curtain around his bed just in time to hear Q murmur calmly, "And I'm fairly sure I'm missing a kidney..."

Suddenly overwhelmed by the sight of him, all Bond can spit out is, "How would you know such a thing?"

Q raises a frank eyebrow. "Suspicious scar, unaccounted lapse in memory. I can't confirm it, of course," -he looks imploringly at the nurse- "but it's worth looking into, yes?"

She nods, looking rather stunned by his forthrightness, and asks tightly, "Anything else?"

"That's all I'm aware of, thank you."

As she leaves, Bond nicks the carbon copy of her report from her clipboard with a stealth that impresses even himself. He reads through the list of terms with a growing, yet still carefully contained, sort of horror. _Badly healed bullet wound three inches from femoral artery, broken orbital bone, broken and incorrectly healed nose, three missing teeth, broken humerus, radius, and assorted fingers, cracked ribs, bruised organs, assorted lacerations, whip slashes, and burns, deep muscle bruises, possible removed kidney..._

Bond looks up at Q's swollen features and, before he can stop himself, he asks, "How did you manage it?"

Q is propped up by pillows, and though to someone unversed in Q's postures he would seem casual, it is abundantly obvious to Bond that he has arranged himself very carefully, and, despite this, is still in pain. He's conscious only because of sheer will power alone. "Sanity is the key," Q explains matter-of-factly. "And, as I am already insane, they could affect only my body. My mind remained untouchable, considering that since it is out of my reach most of the time, it was certainly out of theirs."

This is where Bond would tell him that he's sorry. That if he'd just gotten there a little sooner, run a little faster, this conversation would never have to happen. That for once, Bond doesn't want to be the reason Q is in danger. He might even venture to make oaths—that he won't let this happen again, that they'll be together as they should in whatever capacity they can think of. He wants to say that usually when he fucks up this bad he never gets a chance to apologize to the person he's ruined, and he's tired of this pattern that haunts him at every turn, through a thousand lifetimes. He wants to say he's never felt like this before, because it might be true. But he doesn't.

His feet are just beginning to move him toward Q when a surprisingly firm hand grabs him by his collar and yanks him out of the room.

In the hallway, Moneypenny looks up at him fiercely.

"You can't be here," she says urgently. "I meant what I said before the meeting. Now it's too late."

"What are you talking about?"

"They don't know if Q's been compromised yet. He's not supposed to have any contact with high level staff before he goes through the tests, for security reasons. And Mallory already knows your here."

"How?"

She narrows her eyes at his sudden thickness, and points to a camera above their heads. "What the hell do you think that is? But now he's going to put you on assignment until they get Q squared away, so you won't interfere."

"He's not been compromised. That's ridiculous. And Tove's dead anyways."

She shakes her head hurriedly. "We're translating her archives from Finnish as we speak. It's as we predicted. Tove Baek had ties to have a dozen anarchist cells, beyond her relationship with the Marteles. Those are not the sort of people we need to get infiltrated by."

"Q wouldn't—"

"That's not the point. He's going to go through the same hurdles as every other recovered employee and you're going to be abroad while it happens."

He takes a step back, betrayed.

"I tried to warn you," she says, some of the sympathy returning to the pits of her eyes. "But this is massive. Bigger than either of us."

The sound of pattering, well tailored shoes on tile floors reaches them, and all that Bond can squeeze from his lips as M rounds the corner is, "Shit."


	3. Islamabad

Gareth Mallory is not a particularly merciful man, but he likes to think he is. And he is a member of an elite intelligence community, so lying, even to himself, is not really a stretch.

So he takes pity on Bond and sends him not to Yemen, or any other dry country, but to Oaxaca, where he trusts that the agent will hand off the designated USB drive then hunker down and drink himself into oblivion. And if he's drinking himself into oblivion, at least he's not causing international incidents or making contact with possibly compromised personnel.

Sacrifices must be made. And you can't always get what you want, which Mallory figures Bond should know better than anybody by now.

m m m

Separated again, he finds himself empty, like a house in a Hopper painting. His mind—if not directly engaged in pulling out his passport or reading a Spanish sign or buckling a seatbelt with more care than is necessary for a task so simple and familiar—is enveloped by the image of Q, so carefully arranged in a bed in Medical, thin neck cocked to one side. The bespectacled eyes so clearly ask, "So where does this leave us?" as he takes in Bond's guilt and desperation and lack of control. And Bond has no way to answer him now, even if he could think of a response even remotely close to the truth.

Oaxaca is fine. Lovely, even. For alcoholics, for secret agents, for scores of tourists and businessmen and locals and students and loads of other members of the human race. But Bond can't stay. He gets the job done because he's forgotten how not to, and instead of making contact with HQ, with a meaningless member of Q-Branch who will refer to him as "Commander Bond" rather than "007, you prick," he decides to go straight to the airport.

He knows he can't go home, that Mallory will catch him and send him someplace far less comfortable, some place that will keep him entangled in work and people. And Bond has always liked to maintain some illusion of control, entertain some reality where his choices are his own.

So a day and a half later he's breathing in the soothing, welcoming air of Islamabad, a city that has never failed to pull together the pieces of his psyche. He luxuriates in the apartment buildings and the mosques, the parks and the traffic, the rhythm of Urdu on the radio and the Perso-Arabic calligraphy on the signs.

Q still lingers behind his eyelids, but their situation somehow seems so much more resolved now, so much more manageable. With the breeze of Islamabad pressing so insistently against the stubble on his chin, a preternatural knowledge rests on him, he thinks, and he sees Q recovering fully, or at least back to the physical state he was in before. He is, of course, uncompromised, and the trauma of captivity fades into the past so he can return to duty, return as the voice in Bond's ear. He sees their relationship as unstressed, leaving it to be whatever it's destined to be, though he hasn't quite figured out what that is yet.

He even entertains the notion—the fantasy, really—of the two of them, some day in the future, in Islamabad together.

He allows the thought to fester, even though he's fully aware of it's level of impossibility. Always impossible, even before Tove Baek's rampage, because Q doesn't fly. Not because he's afraid, as Moneypenny once perceived and passed on, but because of the chronic spinal injury that prevents him from maintaining a sitting position for any long period of time. It's a true shame, Bond thinks, because there's something in Q that he believes really might enjoy travel, the adventure of it all. As it is, though, Q has only left the UK twice.

Three times, Bond has to remind himself. Tove's Icelandic compound.

He can hardly contemplate the agony it must've been for Q flying over there under Tove's watchful eye, constantly having to weigh the enormity of the pain against the fear of her finding out his pressure point, if she didn't know it already, and exploiting it. He pushes the image of Q's strained face from his mind, before the rest of the horror comes, as he intends to stay sane.

But he remains in Islamabad for three days, wandering the streets, touching up his language skills, breathing in, and on the third day he's already feeling London drawing him back, even before Moneypenny rings. She's relieved he's using his Q-Branch approved mobile again, the one he could barely look at for the last few months.

"M says you can come back, if you think you can handle it," she relays.

He snorts involuntarily, because he's fairly sure no one has ever mistaken him for the stable type. "How is he?"

"He's doing alright, I think. There's been so much going on I haven't even made it down to see him when he's awake. They have him in and out of surgery, fixing all the half-healed wounds and whatnot. Apparently his face was all swollen after they repaired his orbital, and it's so odd to imagine him so undignified, isn't it?"

Bond almost feels himself begin to smile at this, before it occurs to him that torture and it's aftermath really is the most undignified thing there is. "I'll fly out as soon as possible."

m m m

At baggage claim in Heathrow, Moneypenny is waiting for him.

"M send you to spy on me?" he asks wearily.

"I'm doing you a favor," she replies, looking up from her watch. "He's got no quarrels with sending you off to the Atacama desert without a map if you forget yourself. I don't want that anymore than you do."

She's right, of course, but that doesn't stop him from silently wishing that he could have engineered a way to fly in to Gatwick, just to throw her off.

Moneypenny gives him a withering look, like she's reading his mind.

"I don't know if you'd be interested," she begins cautiously, once they've managed to settle into a cab. "But we're starting our interrogation of Dae-Jung Baek today. Psych's just gotten through with him."

"Do you expect he'll say anything of interest? Or, anything at all, for that matter?"

"If he's got any sense he will," Moneypenny replies. "Though I suppose we shouldn't hold out much hope for a man who married a criminal with vaguely egomaniacal tendencies."

"I suppose not," Bond murmurs, but he can't help thinking of his relationship, or whatever it may be, with someone of not only questionable but often nonexistent sanity.


End file.
